Author: Spencer Ackerman

Noah Shachtman got an interview with Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked about the likely prospective NATO-Afghan offensive in Kandahar. Specifically, Shachtman wanted to know how a U.S. military that’s emphasized the need for local buy-in from Kandaharis for the attack is handling the fact that so far, the locals appear to be saying no. I recently got Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s spokesman to describe some of the commanding general’s efforts in that regard, and here Mullen basically seconds McChrystal:

Danger Room: So do you need have the elders or the people’s buy-in before an operation starts?

Mullen: I think you’ll see the same kind of approach that General McChrystal used in Marja [before the offensive there began]. They are going to meet with a lot of leaders before the operation. That approach worked there, and I think you’ll see it again.

The question then becomes whether NATO truly solicits local buy-in or simply declares that it’s got what it needs to attack. Mullen sounded pretty sure that no matter what, the offensive is on: “I think the operation in Kandahar, which have commenced, will go a long way towards doing that. So that’s sort of the next big step for me, is Kandahar.” (McChrystal has said that the “shaping” operations to secure the areas on the city’s periphery have begun.) That doesn’t sound like a man who’s prepared to take no for an answer.

Haaretz reports on comments the undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, made in Singapore about Iran:

The U.S. has ruled out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program any time soon, hoping instead negotiations and United Nations sanctions will prevent the Middle East nation from developing nuclear weapons, a top U.S. defense department official said Wednesday.

“Military force is an option of last resort,” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy said during a press briefing in Singapore. “It’s off the table in the near term.”

And just wait for segments of the conservative movement and the Republican Party to freak out, as Bill Kristol did over Adm. Michael Mullen’s similar disinclination for an Iran attack over the weekend. Yet if the lesson of the Bush administration’s experience at the United Nations ahead of the Iraq war is any experience, the only way the Security Council will unite around a sanctions package is if the international community doesn’t believe it’s setting the stage for an American attack. The same goes for a post-Security Council resolution coalition of Iran’s major trading partners that the Obama administration is waiting to assemble. There’s a surprising amount of international willpower for sanctions aimed at stopping Iran’s illicit uranium enrichment activities. There’s absolutely none for seeding the bed for an attack, and the prospect of one will drain away the willpower for sanctions. Hence Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ aggressive pushback on The New York Times’ leak of his January Iran memo, and hence Flournoy’s comments in Singapore.

Philip Mudd, one of the intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was associate executive director of the National Security Branch. Mudd confirmed in an email that he left “about six weeks ago,” but didn’t immediately respond to additional questions about his departure.

Mudd was a longtime CIA counterterrorism specialist before coming to the FBI, but it doesn’t appear as if he’ll return to his home agency. This could be it for Mudd’s government career.

And that would be a strange turn. After spending years as an analyst away from the spotlight, President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano nominated Mudd to head the intelligence branch at the Department of Homeland Security, taking over from another storied CIA veteran, Charlie Allen. But Mudd withdrew his name from consideration, reportedly after Senate staffers thought he might have been involved in interrogation or detention decisions of the previous administration — an allegation that has never been substantiated. White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said at the time that Mudd would have made “an excellent Undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis.”

Meanwhile, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced just now that Sean Joyce, a longtime FBI special agent, will head up the bureau’s National Security Branch, overseeing all intelligence and national security functions. Joyce would have been Mudd’s new boss if Mudd stuck around.

I’m awaiting formal comment from FBI and CIA on Mudd and will update when I have more.

Update: From CIA spokesman George Little: “Phil had a distinguished career at the Agency, where he made outstanding contributions to many aspects of our vital intelligence mission. His consummate professionalism and leadership made a stand-out of a stand-up guy.”

Sure to give agita to the Israeli embassy in Washington: The Center for a New American Security publishes a 100-page multiple-case study of how the international community could midwife a Palestinian state from a security perspective.

It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack in it, so I won’t try to summarize the specific recommendations. But CNAS, looking at recent cases of international peacekeeping forces in transitional states or autonomous provinces, examines what security conditions need to be met for a viable independent Palestine that doesn’t threaten Israel to come into being.

Israel generally has balked over the years at the prospect of international peacekeeping forces patrolling the West Bank, as such a force would limit Israel’s freedom of military action in occupied Palestine. (Andrew Exum, one of the studies’ authors, lists a short host of reasons why Israel shouldn’t have a problem with such a force while — at least in the introduction — glossing over the fact that it does.) But less important than any specific recommendation is the fact that the think tank that has launched many an official into the Obama Pentagon and State Department, CNAS, is expending any intellectual heft on the issue at all, let along thinking through the modalities of interim internationalization of West Bank/Jordan River Valley security. Such a detailed study, coming in advance of a potential Obama peace plan — which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu definitely does not want — will most likely be read at the Israeli embassy and in Jerusalem as a sign that a real U.S. push on a two-state solution is gathering momentum.

And it reaffirms a linkage that some on the American Jewish right and the Israeli government don’t want to see made. “Although peace in the Middle East is hardly the exclusive responsibility of the United States,” Exum writes in the introduction, “it is a goal long sought by its political leaders and one inextricably linked to U.S. interests.” That viewpoint was roundly mocked as simplistic at the AIPAC conference this year, despite it being the stated policy of decades of American administrations.

Laura Rozen takes a crack at it.

In other words, be willing to try to get back to diplomatic negotiations with Iran, slow down their program, protect regional allies, and pursue targeted sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard.

Wait! Don’t click away from this post yet!

Most defense secretaries find themselves frustrated by the labyrinthine system in place to approve military sales to partner countries. Export controls are complex, bureaucratic things designed to place multiple tiers of checks to err on the side of keeping technologies that the U.S. military relies on for dominance out of foreign hands. As with classification, it routinely goes too far, leading to vexed allies who can’t understand why the U.S. won’t sell them the weapons or spare parts it promised and a glut of restrictions that make it difficult to determine which truly dangerous technology needs to stay in U.S. hands.

So this afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is giving a speech — the press embargo just lifted — to a business/defense partnership forum about changing the export control system. His recommendations, which he says reflect interagency consensus, focus on centralization and streamlining. Instead of multiple lists controlled by multiple agencies requiring rules for which technologies can be sold without obtaining special licenses, the Obama administration will create a new standard list, placing tiers of importance around technologies that are and aren’t crucial to U.S. military supremacy:

This single list, combined with a single licensing agency, would allow us to concentrate on controlling those critical technologies and items – the “Crown Jewels” – that are the basis for maintaining our military technology advantage, especially technologies and items that no foreign government or company can duplicate.  Items that have no significant military impact, or that use widely available technology, could be approved for export quickly.  We envision a more dynamic, tiered control system where an item or technology would be “cascaded” from a higher to a lower level of control as its sensitivity decreases.

That’s inevitably going to prompt criticism that the Obama administration is selling too much stuff to too many people. Gates’ reply:

By consolidating most export licensing functions in one agency and creating an enforcement coordination agency, we can focus our energies and scrutiny on technologies that truly threaten American security, making it is far less likely that these critical items will fall into the wrong hands. It is also important to bear in mind that the U.S. government will retain the ability to impose economic sanctions on any foreign country or group, to include prohibiting the export of any equipment, material, or technologies that could have military use.

Still, the administration will require congressional approval for creating a single licensing agency for defense exports — a “fundamental change,” in Gates’ view — as well as a new agency to coordinate enforcement. Will Congress endorse Gates’ proposal?

If legislators balk, they’ll be faced with a problem.

“Not too long ago, a British C-17 spent hours disabled on the ground in Australia – not because the needed part wasn’t available, but because U.S. law required the Australians to seek U.S. permission before doing the repair,” Gates related to Business Executives for National Security. ”These are two of our very strongest allies for God’s sake!”

Via Peter Feaver, this year’s annual Military Times poll — valuable not for any individual year’s findings, since it solicits responses and therefore isn’t scientific, but for measuring trends among career military folks — finds a largely conservative officer corps that isn’t buying what the GOP is selling:

An exclusive survey of some 1,800 active-duty troops shows the percentage of self-identified Republicans has decreased by one-third since 2004, from 60 percent to 41 percent, while the percentage of self-identified independents has nearly doubled to 32 percent during the same period.

The big drop appears to have occurred in 2008 and 2009, indicative of broader political sentiments in the country during that period. But that doesn’t translate into increased warmness for the Democrats or for President Obama. While uniformed sentiment on Obama will probably take another year to track as a poll trend, this year finds them “virtually divided” on the president. Yes, the guy who ordered two big troop increases to Afghanistan. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, the respondents are “more pessimistic about the mission in Afghanistan” than in recent years.

Alas, the crosstabs are for subscribers and I am not a subscriber.

Brazen:

Deputy Mayor Azizullah Yarmal walked into a mosque in central Kandahar, turned toward Mecca and began to pray to Allah. As he reached the point where he and the others in the mosque knelt in unison and then bent forward to touch their foreheads to the ground, gunmen made their move, shooting him with a pistol, said Zalmy Ayoubi, a government spokesman.

The New York Times describes Yarmal as one of the few Kandahar public officials whom locals view as honest and untouched by corruption. While a Taliban spokesman described the assassination as retribution for Yarmal’s work for “this puppet government,” that gives his death strategic importance: in a battle for legitimacy, NATO will need legitimate local partners in Kandahar — precisely what the Taliban seek to deny the coalition ahead of a possible offensive to clear the Taliban from the city this summer.

The Obama administration doesn’t want to fight with Afghan President Hamid Karzai anymore. Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the U.S.’s relationship with the Afghan president is in “good shape.” That stuff about Karzai threatening to join the Taliban if he didn’t get to control an election monitor? In the past. (“The waters got roiled a little bit,” Holbrooke said at a press briefing yesterday.) Karzai will visit Washington from May 10 to 14 and soon afterward will hold a “peace jirga,” or national council seeking to establish the contours of a reconciliation offer to the Taliban.

Later yesterday, Holbrooke got in a shot at the United Nations’ former envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide. Eide’s old deputy, the former U.S. ambassador (and Holbrooke ally) Peter Galbraith, accused Eide of placing the U.N. mission in a quiescent position when Karzai committed widespread fraud in last year’s presidential election. After a screening of a forthcoming HBO documentary about Holbrooke’s friend Sergio Vieira de Mello, the revered U.N. diplomat killed in Iraq in 2003, Holbrooke told a panel discussion that he had recently come from a Kabul meeting that included Staffan de Mistura, Eide’s successor, whom he called “a substantial step forward” from his predecessor.

In a message that Iraq Veterans Against the War is helping spread, two soldiers identified as serving with the company in Wikileaks’ Iraq video — the one showing Army close air support firing on Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists – have written an open letter to Iraqis expressing their regret and seeking to make some form of reparation:

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

Specialists Steiber and McCord continue, “Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones.” A press statement explaining their letter is here.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who insightfully notes that we’re the only country whose prestige is on the rise in the eyes of our international fellows.

No sooner did this story go out about the Obama administration’s strained ties with U.S. Muslim organizations than comes this announcement from the Arab-American Institute:

Ambassador Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, will join members of Congress, foreign dignitaries and other distinguished guests in honoring awardees at this year’s Kahlil Gibran “Spirit of Humanity” Awards Gala in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, April 21, 2010.

Marking the Arab American Institute’s (AAI) 25th Anniversary, this year’s awards gala honors four individuals and one corporation for their work promoting inclusion, cultural understanding and cooperation across ethnic, racial and religious lines

A joint U.S.-Iraqi raid near Tikrit decapitated al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate on Sunday. Two of the country’s most wanted terrorists, Abu Ayyub al Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who have been responsible for thousands of U.S. and Iraqi deaths since 2006, were tracked by U.S. and Iraqi intelligence and special-operations forces to a hideout near the Sunni Iraqi enclave.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, called the successful raid “potentially the most significant blow to al-Qaeda in Iraq since the beginning of the insurgency.” Well, military leaders said the same thing after the June 2006 killing of al-Masri and al-Baghdadi’s predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the insurgency intensified for another year, requiring the abandonment of al-Qaeda by Iraqi Sunnis, the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad during the broader sectarian war and the U.S.’s shift to a counterinsurgency strategy to tamp down violence beginning in late summer 2007. Odierno’s boss in that latter effort, Gen. David Petraeus, issued a more measured statement:

The deaths of these two leaders represent significant blows against extremism in Iraq. While we recognize that AQI retains the capability of carrying out periodic extremist attacks, Iraqi leaders have vowed to press the fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq. In accordance with the Iraq-U.S. Security Agreement, U.S. forces will continue to assist and enable our Iraqi partners in that effort.

To take one more crack at Adm. Michael Mullen’s comments after a Columbia University address yesterday, it’s certainly clear that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took pains to keep any military option against Iran as a last resort. But he may have shifted his emphasis about what hypothetical military strikes might accomplish.

According to Reuters (via Laura Rozen), Mullen said military strikes — presumably meaning missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — would go “a long way” toward delaying Iran’s nuclear program. That’s tonally different than some of Mullen’s comments earlier this year that threw cold water on the efficacy of military action. Consider this February comment to the press, shortly after Mullen toured the Middle East:

We owe the secretary and the president a range of options for this threat. We owe the American people our readiness. But as I’ve said many times, I worry a lot about the unintended consequences of any sort of military action. For now, the diplomatic and the economic levers of international power are and ought to be the levers first pulled. Indeed, I would hope they are always and consistently pulled. No strike, however effective, will be, in and of itself, decisive.

My emphasis. In fairness, it’s possible to reconcile the two statements — while no single strike could be decisive, a bunch of them could go a long way toward slowing Iran’s nuclear program. But Mullen used to talk about what military strikes couldn’t accomplish, and now he’s venturing toward musing on what they can – while still cautioning that they still carry a big risk of unintended consequences and ought to be the very last resort. If Mullen was looking to tamp down Mideast speculation that a misinterpreted memo from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates meant the U.S. had few military options against Iran, that’s one way to go about it.

The former secretary of state and national security adviser can be criticized on many grounds, but if there’s one thing that defined Condoleezza Rice’s history and government service, it’s her expertise on U.S.-Russia relations. So it’s conspicuous that she hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, taken any position on the merits of the New START accord with the Russians to cut the two nations’ nuclear arsenals and limit the number of deployed systems to deliver a nuclear payload.

In his New Yorker column this week, Hendrik Hertzberg reminds us how the old Sovietologist guard of the Cold War-era Republican foreign policy establishment have embraced the treaty, even as the current crop of GOP senators express reservations:

[S]ix right-of-center foreign-policy sages were invited to comment on the Nuclear Posture Review and New Start. George Shultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, had praise for both. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary under George W. Bush; Fred C. Ikle, a Reagan defense official; and James Schlesinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, offered criticisms so mild they might have been mistaken for lukewarm support. Richard Burt, who negotiated the first Start treaty for Reagan, wrote, “The Obama Administration’s nuclear posture review, together with the new Start treaty with Russia, will strengthen American security and reinforce the nation’s global leadership.”

What, no Rice?

So I contacted Rice’s assistants at Stanford University and learned that the former secretary and national security adviser hasn’t issued any statement so far and isn’t granting interview requests at the moment. Far be it for me to speculate why that is, but it seems odd that she wouldn’t wish to express a perspective on a subject firmly within her wheelhouse.

Via Danger Room, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, took a jaundiced view of the role of contractors in Afghanistan:

“I think we’ve gone too far,” McChrystal said at France’s IHEDN military institute. “I actually think we would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved.”

Alternatives could include increasing the number of troops “if necessary,” or “using a greater number of Afghan contractors, or Afghans to help with the mission,” he said.

McChrystal said the use of contractors was founded upon “good intentions,” such as to limit military commitments or to save money for governments.

“I think it doesn’t save money,” he said. “We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that I think is greater than it ought to be.”

It doesn’t appear as if McChrystal distinguished between security contractors — what people tend to mean when they talk about the nefarious influence of contract personnel in war zones — and contractors for, say, food and laundry and development advice and logistics (who also have been involved in a lot of waste, fraud and abuse). Nathan Hodge at Danger Room is skeptical that anything will actually change as a result, since the alternative is to increase the size and function of the military significantly, and that’s loaded with political peril.

That said, one point McChrystal didn’t apparently make is that security contractors in Afghanistan aren’t obligated by law to follow the commander’s guidance for waging the war, something crucial in a battle for a local population’s political allegiances, since that population will distinguish between Americans and non-Americans, not U.S. troops and U.S. contractors. With the military prepared to award a new contract for assistance in training Afghan police, that’s a subject where McChrystal’s words could go a long way.

Noah Shachtman attends a Columbia University address by Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that featured the admiral tamping down the persistent speculation that the U.S. or perhaps certain anxious Mideastern allies will attack Iran:

Sure, U.S. strikes might set back Tehran’s atomic weapons program — for a while. But the “unintended consequences” of a hit on Iran’s nuclear facilities could easily outweigh the benefits of that delay, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told a forum at Columbia University.

“Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” Mullen said. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

If there was any doubt that the Pentagon doesn’t want the January Gates Memo on Iran misinterpreted, let it be allayed.

The New York Times runs a very good piece about the strained, tentative and sub rosa relationship between the Obama administration and American Muslim organizations. There’s an insightful bit about how meetings between Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, and U.S. Muslim groups contributed to her department’s repeal of ethnic profiling rules for air-travel screening created by the department after Northwest Flight 253.

At the same time, it’s a testament to how effective the right was at smearing Obama as a clandestine Muslim who planned to replace the Constitution with Islamic law and recruit your children to al-Qaeda. Each Muslim nominee for an administration position receives a level of background-dependent scrutiny from conservative fever swamps that no one of any other background receives. That has the compounding effect of disinclining the administration to seek out qualified Muslims for important roles.

It also has a policy effect. Recall this line from Obama’s speech in Cairo last June about resetting U.S.-Muslim world relations:

[I]n the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.

Still waiting on that one. The most the administration can say on that front so far is Attorney General Eric Holder has said he’s unsure whether to appeal a decision by a federal judge that the government illegally wiretapped the extremist-linked al-Haramain charity.

This is what a smear is designed to do: raise the political stakes for straying beyond the restricted boundaries of a policy discussion. It’s fear-mongering, pure and simple. And it’s working.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

The New York Times reported on a memo written by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in January about a paucity of U.S. policy options toward Iran if it continued with illicit uranium enrichment but stopped short of possessing a bomb. It’s a real problem — the proliferation equivalent of a bank robber pointing to the bulge in his pocket. (Does he have a gun or not?) By not declaring itself a nuclear power, something Obama administration officials say won’t happen for at least a year, Iran won’t have opted out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but it will have increased its deterrent force by keeping its adversaries guessing about its actual nuclear capability. Gates’ memo asked if the U.S. was ready for that situation.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Whether it was or wasn’t then, it’s pretty easy to see administration policy since then inclining to answer Gates’ question. It’s looking more and more like President Obama — who was so roundly vilified for deigning to propose, let alone pursue, a year’s worth of diplomatic outreach to the Iranian leadership — will be the one who shepherds an economic sanctions package on the Iranian regime’s key organs through the United Nations Security Council. After winning China’s acquiescence; spending almost a year and a half rebuilding relations with Russia; and leveraging new and less patient leadership at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the administration has pieces in position to unite the international community against Iran’s uranium enrichment. Even Obama’s chief Iran critic, his 2008 presidential rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), had to concede Wednesday, “I never thought a policy of engagement with Iran’s rulers would succeed, but I understand why the president pursued it.”

Beyond Iran, however, is the general problem of a hostile power nearing nuclear breakout capacity, something Gates’ memo correctly identifies as yielding unclear sanction under the NPT. Maybe that’s why next month, the signatories of the NPT will gather in New York to strengthen its provisions. And according to administration officials, one of the areas the U.S. wants to focus on is creating new rules for when signatories face greater penalties for drifting into noncompliance, perhaps through increased verification authorities and responsibilities for the IAEA — something last week’s nuclear security summit in Washington didn’t really substantively address — allowing the international community to have earlier warning into prospective breakout capabilities. The penalties that would come into force in such a case remain to be proposed, debated and accepted or rejected, of course. But the whole discussion speaks to the lacunae that Gates frets over in his memo.

What should be clear is that the memo doesn’t propose going to war, nor does it make war more likely. Administration officials have never ruled out any option on Iran. But they have leaned, at every step, on measures that attract wide international support and deny that support to Iran — from diplomatic outreach; to intensifying diplomacy when word of the Qom reactor leaked; to the proposal for enriching Iran’s uranium to a bomb-incapable state in a third country; to, as the result of the first three, economic sanctions. The administration shows no sign of changing that fundamental strategy.

Seen from that perspective, the prospect of military action, ahead of a push to sanction Iran at the U.N., would place that strategy at risk. The coalition Obama has stitched together might fray if other countries view the sanctions maneuver as a pretext for military strikes. Hence Gates’ own clarifying statement:

The New York Times sources who revealed my January memo to the National Security Advisor mischaracterized its purpose and content. With the Administration’s pivot to a pressure track on Iran earlier this year, the memo identified next steps in our defense planning process where further interagency discussion and policy decisions would be needed in the months and weeks ahead. The memo was not intended as a “wake up call” or received as such by the President’s national security team. Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision making process. There should be no confusion by our allies and adversaries that the United States is properly and energetically focused on this question and prepared to act across a broad range of contingencies in support of our interests.

The Los Angeles Times follows up on Attorney General Eric Holder’s moment of consensus Wednesday with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on creating new indefinite detention rules for a post-Guantanamo effort against al-Qaeda. It’s a consequence of the Obama administration’s decision not only to close Guantanamo but to renounce the CIA’s long-term secret indefinite detention facilities, colloquially known as “black sites.” And the State Department is uneasy about creating a new framework for extrajudicial indefinite detention outside routine battlefield detention in war zones like Afghanistan:

[A]pproval of the guidelines is being delayed, primarily by State Department officials who are concerned that formalizing the rules will lead inevitably to greater use of long-term detention by the administration under conditions similar to those at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, which President Obama has pledged to close.

You have to figure that’s Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, taking that position. Since the absence of a new detentions framework for outside Afghanistan — like for, oh, I don’t know, Pakistan and Yemen — creates an incentive for the Obama administration to kill terrorism suspects rather than capture them and put them … somewhere … it casts a new light on Koh’s legal blessing of the administration’s drone strikes. (And, perhaps, assassinations.)

Attorney General Holder briefly touched on a similar point about the geopolitical implications of a terror-detentions system last night, although I didn’t really view what he said as particularly significant. After reading the Los Angeles Times’ piece, however, I wonder if he was sticking up for State’s viewpoint here. You make the call:

[T]here is the issue of international cooperation.   Our civilian courts are well respected internationally.   Our allies are comfortable with the formal and informal mechanisms to transfer terrorism suspects to the United States for trial in civilian court.   As we prove the effectiveness and fairness of military commissions, I expect our allies will take notice.   And I hope they will grow more willing to cooperate with commission trials.

But if the allies aren’t comfortable with the commissions yet, how comfortable will they be with indefinite detention? Especially after the hard-fought battle to close Guantanamo?

Finally, the paper identifies some of the advocates of a new indefinite detention system as coming from the Pentagon. That would make sense, given Col. William Lietzau’s mandate, as Pentagon detentions chief, to come up with new post-Guantanamo detentions policy for the department.